Cyberpsyche

One thing that can be said about the success of Agile practices, in software development, is they have created many discussions on how to manage Agile teams. This has caused some companies to question what roles need to be filled in organizations to ensure project are as successful as they can be. Agile processes are a product of their time, there has been a growing trend in other management disciplines, like Supply Line management and production. Studies of organizations, in recent years, increasingly look to natural systems and self-organizing structures.

When asked recently on radio-four about the English Cricket Board's accepting money from Allen Stanford, Frank Cottrell Boyce came back with an interesting perspective:

A miser sold all that he had and bought a lump of gold, which he buried in a hole in the ground by the side of an old wall. Daily he visited it to inspect it. Rousing the curiosity of one of his workmen, who, suspected that there might be treasure and decided to watch his movements. He soon discovered the hidden treasure, and when his master's back was turned, came to the lump of gold, and stole it. When the Miser returned, on his next visit, found the hole empty he began weep and to tear his hair.

I blogged earlier about zealous politicians trying to turn off internet connections to prevent copyrights from being infringed. Politicians in New Zealand seem to be about to pass a law that would allow internet connections to be severed just on an accusation alone. Freedom groups are portraying this as assuming guilt just on an accusation: this has to be wrong by any standard. What is the excuse? It is too difficult for ISP's to prove that copyright is being infringed. I don't live in New Zealand but this type of policy should be shown the contempt it deserves.

Hewlett Packard have developed an interesting photographic technique that is being used by archeologists, although it could have interesting uses for other applications. It involves taking multiple images of the same subject under various lighting conditions by moving and changing the intensity of the light. These images are then merged together into a Polynomial Texture Map which represents how the subject responds to light. This allows photograph to be re-light in software showing up features normally invisible to the naked eye.

When using the Seam container there is a useful @Logging annotation which injects a Log object at runtime into the bean. In the seam documentation for unit testing the advice generally is to have setters on the class to allow the dependencies to be set. For logging this is not really desirable. One alternative for this is to write a small class that will inject a Log object prior to testing:

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Logger;
import org.jboss.seam.log.Log;
 
public class LoggerInjector {
 

I recently went to an interesting talk given by Phil Bourne about off-camera flash which he gave a practical demonstration of using multiple speedlight flashes off-camera to get studio like effects.